Thursday, January 7, 2010

I've got nothing today

I can't think of anything to say here today. Maybe something will come to me later.

The best I can do is ask you to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Galileo discovering four of Jupiter's moons. On January 7, 1610 the accepted belief was that all objects in the sky orbited the Earth. (Yes, other people had already come up with the orbiting the sun model, but it still wasn't accepted by the church and therefore you were branded a nut job by God himself if you believed it.)

On January 7, Galileo took his cool new telescope and pointed it at Jupiter. He saw a few little dots surrounding it. Over the next couple of nights he looked again and again and those little dots (there turned out to be four of them) were moving. He deduced that they weren't orbiting the Earth, the were orbiting Jupiter.

And thus modern astronomy was born... sort of... eventually... Lets just say that after enough people saw the same thing it started poking holes in the non-nut job accepted theory.

Thanks Galileo!

Galilean moons

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